Thanks to EdNews’ own Todd Engdahl for bringing my attention to an important new Center on Reinventing Public Education white paper by Paul Hill and Marguerite Roza: Curing Baumol’s Disease: In Search of Productivity Gains in K-12 Schooling” (PDF).

The big question: Can we overcome the tendency of public K-12 education to become a progressively more costly and less productive enterprise? And if so, how?

The implications:

More than a year into the fiscal crisis we know what we can expect if costs continue to rise and revenues remain constrained: hiring freezes, teacher layoffs, school day furloughs, and wage and benefit reductions. Together these actions work to erode the existing system with absolutely no upside for students.

The thesis: We can’t afford inaction. Despite the current budget crunch, education officials need to make the small sacrifice of investing in genuine research and development to find and test needed productivity gains that can be scaled throughout the system.

The plan: Hill and Roza present a basic, five-step action plan, which includes studying how other service sectors have overcome Baumol’s disease and testing how similar practices might apply to (and succeed in) K-12 education.

I agree with the authors’ thesis. We need to look to make more progress in the areas of information technology, deregulation, mission focus, labor innovations and genuine organizational change. Serious leadership is needed to help re-think carefully what we want our public schools to do and more efficient possibilities for how they might work. A growing body of evidence strongly suggests the possibility that Baumol’s disease can be overcome. Why not in K-12 education?

Nevertheless, I remain somewhat skeptical (though tempted, I resist using the word despair) that our local and state policy makers can find the incentive to pursue the research and development approach. Additional creativity also may be needed to add the incentive. Where the incentive comes from at this point, I don’t know.

Hill and Roza are highly qualified and experienced, and hardly anywhere near the ideological fringes. While the R & D approach they propose is truly bold (and downright adventurous and/or scary for some in the K-12 world), it is also very vital. Someone else will have to make a compelling case for how our schools can afford not to do this. In the meantime, I hope against hope that someone in Colorado will seize the moment and take the innovative lead in this approach.

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